The good news on global development

The world’s attention is limited. Today’s burning emergency becomes tomorrow’s forgotten crisis. When the media spotlight moves on, vital issues in development and humanitarian response risk being forgotten. In this podcast miniseries, Development Initiatives’ (DI’s) CEO Adrian Lovett speaks with people with deep expertise to take us beyond the headlines and explore the missing issues, missing voices and missing data as we ask: What are we missing?

In this episode, we speak with two people who have argued that we have underplayed progress that has been made on global development in recent decades, and there are strong reasons to be optimistic. In 2024, reflecting on the Covid pandemic, global economic crises and numerous conflicts that are undermining international security, does that argument still hold?

Our guests are:

• Charles Kenny, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of multiple books on development and economics.
• Anna Rosling Rönnlund, co-author of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, and a Co-Founder, VP and Head of UX & Design at Gapminder, an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions.

For more on the issues covered in this episode, read:

• Our factsheet, Inequality: Global trends.
• Our factsheet, Economic poverty trends: global, regional and national.

What are we missing? is a production of Development Initiatives, a global organisation harnessing the power of data and evidence to end poverty, reduce inequality and increase resilience. All views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Development Initiatives.

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